Robert Sharphttp://www.robertsharp.co.uk
Everyone has a right to my opinionsThu, 19 Mar 2015 10:18:07 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Why not do an extra leaders’ debate via #Meerkat?http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/19/why-not-do-an-extra-leaders-debate-via-meerkat/
http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/19/why-not-do-an-extra-leaders-debate-via-meerkat/#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 09:39:28 +0000http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=9530There’s a new app in town, called Meerkat. It allows you to stream live video direct from your mobile phone or tablet, with the link appearing in your Twitter stream.

If 2004 was about Meetup, 2008 was about Facebook, and 2012 was about Twitter, 2016 is going to be about Meerkat (or something just like it).

(He is of course talking about US politics). I wonder whether that’s true though: I fancy there may be a premium on asynchronicity—sending messages to people to read when they have time, rather than in the moment. How much value is there in This Is Happening Literally Right Now over the Twitter news model of This Just Happened? Meerkat does not seem to have any catch-up functionality—if you click on a link to a stream that has ended, there’s no way to view it back. Other services like Ustream and Google Hangouts do offer that functionality and I bet the Meerkat devs are beavering away (or whatever it is a meerkat does) to get this feature into the app.

Pfeiffer also notes how streaming apps like this could undercut the broadcasters in the same way that blogs and Twitter have undercut traditional news outlets:

Think about it this way: Up until about two weeks ago, broadcasting an event live required a large and quite expensive satellite truck, a ton of expensive cables and expensive satellite time. Now you can do it with your phone — the same machine you use to text, check Instagram, hail an Uber, and play Candy Crush.

The first part of this is not really true: broadcasting an event live has not required a satellite truck for many-years. Streaming services are well established and I have experimented with them myself, streaming round-table discussions for English PEN and even running the first (and probably, only) Second Life event at a political party conference while I was at the SMF, back in 2008.

Such events did require a little bit of technical knowledge to pull off: messing about with firewalls, IP addresses and FireWire cables to get the images online. An iPhone or Android app would have been far easier. However, the cost to live-stream an event was in the hundreds of pounds, not tens of thousands.

During the past month there has been a great deal of debate in the UK about… debates. David Cameron has refused to debate Ed Miliband in a head-to-head encounter and will only take part if the six leaders of the other major parties are all included.

Most of the controversy has centred around the OfCom rules on fair election coverage, by which the major broadcasters like the BBC and Sky are bound to abide. Could the broadcasters ‘empty chair’ Mr Cameron? Currently it seems they could not, without trampling over their obligation to impartiality.

Perhaps the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats could stage an online debate? They could hire some ornate town hall for the evening (you might even find some local council would offer it gratis) and plan a three-way debate. A prominent journalist could certainly be found to chair the event (I understand that Jeremy Clarkson might be free) and streaming costs to (say) YouTube could be made to fit a modest budget. Or, they could entirely do away with the expense of audio-visual equipment, by inviting the audience to broadcast it themselves via Meerkat, Twitter and Facebook mobile apps.

Don’t tell me the debate would not be watched by the many election junkies among us, and that it would not be reported by the media. It would not deliver the audience of a prime time BBC One boradcast, but it would certainly influence the campaign.

And if the Conservatives refused to take part, they would have to make some other case for declining, other than an appeal to the OfCom rules. If the Prime Minister did not show up then he would certainly be ‘empty chaired’.

Yes, announcing a debate and then calling the other side a chicken for refusing to take part is a cheeky campaign tactic. But it’s a staple of the cut-and-thrust world of electioneering. With more opportunities and platforms emerging for debate, this sort of thing will only become more common in elections to come.

Last week the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia hit back at those who have been voicing their dismay at the hideous and inhuman sentence handed down to liberal blogger Raif Badawi.

The Kingdom cannot believe and strongly disapproves what has been addressed in some media outlets about the case of Citizen Rai’ef Mohammed Badowi and the judicial sentence he has received.

While we regret the aggressive attacks these media have leveled against the Kingdom and its Judiciary system, the Kingdom assures at the same time that it rejects in shape and form any interference in its internal affairs.

Blaming the ‘media’ is a well worn cliché that oppressive regimes like to deploy when seeking to play down their human rights abuses. In this case, however, it’s just flat out wrong. Yes, the media have reported on the Raif Badawi case and published scathing op-eds from the likes of yrstrly. But the bulk of the outcry has been on social media, where hundreds of thousands of people are voicing their distaste for Wahhabi justice.

There is also this:

… the Kingdom unequivocally rejects any aggression under the pretext of Human Rights; after all, the constitution of the Kingdom originates from the Islamic Sharia which enshrines one’s sacred rights to life, property, honor, and dignity.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been one of the first States to promote and support human rights and has on this regard respected all international conventions congruent with the Islamic Sharia.

This is just delusional. By no stretch of the imagination can flogging someone for peaceful political speech be considered a protection of “honour and dignity” or human rights.

Both these nuggets put me in mind of ‘The Machine’, the first entry on the wonderful Existential Comics site. The narrative deals with the nature of the mind: is the ‘self’ located in the particular body, or in the patterns we build in our mind over a lifetime?

I had previously assumed it was the former, and teleporting or a backup-restore of our brain was essentially to kill the individual and replace him with a copy who only thinks he is is the orginal (in popular culture, see The Sixth Day with Arnold Schwartzenegger, or China Mieville’s Kraken). The only reason to back up one’s brain, I wrote, was that it would be better to have an approximation of your clone wandering around rather than someone else’s.

But the comic in question has changed my mind. The revelation experienced by the central character was a revelation for me too… that it is the patterns that matter, not the substrate.

Panel 15 from The Machine on Existential Comics

The ending of the comic is, I think, quite beautiful and comforting. But if you subscribe to that philosophy, then the thought of Alzheimers Disease or dementia is horrifying – the death of the Self before the death of the Body.

For (a lot) more on this I recommend the sprawling Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. If that’s too much for you, then I touch upon these themes in The Good Shabti.

]]>http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/16/memory-mind-death-teleportation/feed/0A couple more points, if you please, about the swearing in Black Watchhttp://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/10/a-couple-more-points-if-you-please/
http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/10/a-couple-more-points-if-you-please/#commentsTue, 10 Mar 2015 11:28:43 +0000http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=9512In my essay for the Sunday Herald I made the case for the necessity of the swearing and offensive chatter that makes up much of the dialogue in Black Watch:

They are working class, inarticulate and insecure boys with no prospects other than the army. And when these men speak, they swear. It is integral to their vernacular. To sanitize their words would be to silence them.

Unfortunately the constraints of the page forbade me from elaborating on this point…. but luckily, I have a blog.

The swearing of the enlisted men is also important because of the contrast it presents with the officer class, and the politicians who have sent Scottish soldiers into harm’s way for centuries. The show has a marvellous musical number where Lord Elgin, in full highland dress and regalia, prances around the stage, beckoning the young men to sign-up: “hurrah, hurrah!” He speaks the Queen’s English, and he is as mendacious as they come (“did I mention it would be all over by Christmas” he says as he sends the soldiers off to Flanders in 1914). In this context, the Fifer accents of the soldiers are a necessity. Homogenising the language would be an act of class warfare.

To my mind, the final genius of Black Watch lies in the juxtaposition between the coarse language and the stunning physical theatre. One reason why Steven Hoggett’s choreography is so powerful is because the precise and often tender movements emerge from characters who have been f-ing and c-ing just moments before. The combination jars the audience and is compelling, and it is the rude words that tee-up this possibility.

]]>http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/10/a-couple-more-points-if-you-please/feed/0Defending ‘Black Watch’ and free speech in the classroomhttp://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/09/defending-black-watch/
http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/09/defending-black-watch/#commentsMon, 09 Mar 2015 15:01:52 +0000http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=9505A headteacher in Kirriemuir has caused controversy by banner her pupils from studying Black Watch, the National Theatre of Scotland production that I worked on in 2006. What with this history, couple with the free speech work I do for English PEN, this is perhaps the perfect issue for me to write on. Over the weekend, The Sunday Herald published my essay setting the issue in its context.

Free speech controversies are like solar flares. They burn hot and bright. Right now, it is Angus that is feeling the heat. Last week, the Sunday Herald reported that one headteacher in Kirriemuir had pulled Black Watch off the Highers syllabus because it is “offensive”. Parents are angry at the decision, and have demanded an explanation.

Freedom of expression does not just mean the freedom to write or say what you please, but also the freedom to read and to hear what you choose. The decision to remove Black Watch from the classroom curtails the right of the pupils to read and study one of Scotland’s most culturally significant plays. Moreover, the essays that they have already written on the play will not be assessed.

It is entirely right that prominent figures in Scottish literature have written an open letter, urging the head to reverse her decision (in signing the letter they, too, are exercising their right to free speech). This decision may just affect one school, but that is enough to set a precedent. The free speech issues have been raised and must be debated before any more books are removed from shelves and school-bags.

It is particularly important that we challenge ‘offence’ as the justification for such decisions. If we do not, we run the risk that ‘offence’ becomes ingrained as a legitimate reason for censorship. We put a veto-power in the hands of whoever says they are upset. Offence, and its sibling, indecency, are the perennial free speech battleground in British society, and often it is literature over which we fight. Think of the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses; think of Mary Whitehouse’s crusading legal actions against plays and poems that depicted homosexuality; think of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, prosecuted for obscenity.

During the Chatterley trial, the prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones was criticised for asking whether the book was something “you would wish your wife or servants to read”. This paternalism is often at the heart of classroom censorship – the idea that the kids are too young to comprehend the subtleties of art. Scotland had this debate in the 1990s when Edwin Morgan’s Stobhill sequence of poems, which depict rape and abortion, were the target of a campaign to have them banned from schools. Down in England, ‘Education for Leisure’, Carol Ann Duffy’s chilling poem about a frustrated young man with a knife, was pulled from the GCSE textbooks after critics said it ‘glorified’ knife-crime.

The United States, where even the most parochial levels of government are highly politicised, has endured many battles over what books should be read by children. Since its publication in 1900, various public libraries and parents groups have sought to suppress The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and in recent years the Harry Potter series has been attacked because it promotes witchcraft. Another book that is frequently a source of contention is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is often described as the first great novel of American literature, and yet it also carries 219 instances of the N word. The characters that use it are undoubtedly racist by modern standards, but the book itself-the story of an escaped slave -is far more humane than the people it describes.

In Black Watch, the contentious word is ‘c**t’ which the characters use routinely. C-bombs are dropped into conversation with far more regularity than the sound of actual bombs falling on the Basra military compound where the play is set. Sometimes, the word seems benign, as if the soldiers think it is synonymous with ‘man’ or ‘person’. But this is not always the case, and often it is deployed as an insult. The c-word has a sexist history and meaning and there is no escape from that legacy.

Worse, the characters talk constantly about various sex acts with the women they have met, and use derogatory language about gay men. There is no denying that the characters are offensive. Perhaps they will corrupt the morals of our young people? Will the swearing instil negative values in those who read and watch the play?

In all these attempts to shield young eyes from bad words—whether its Huckleberry Finn, or Black Watch—there sits an implication that children cannot grasp the full meaning of the text. For primary school children, there might be some merit to that argument, but it is patronising when applied to teenagers studying for Highers. Last year, 16 and 17 year-olds in Scotland were asked to vote on the complex question of Scottish Independence. To suggest that these same citizens cannot be trusted to read about characters doing offensive things, is just bizarre.

Moreover, drawing a distinction between what a character says in a play, and the playwright’s message, is surely the very essence of literature studies. In a classroom, the offensive words are not presented alone, but within a highly specific context that a teacher must explain. Indeed, I would suggest that a school is the best place to uncover that context. Those who say that the kids can always read it at home if they want are denying them the chance of a deeper understanding of the play and the issues it raises.

Could the play exist without the swearing? Would it make as much sense if the c-words were all replaced with something else (‘clown’, say). Why be needlessly offensive?

The trouble with that suggestion is that for many playwrights, the offensive aspects are not gratuitous but essential to their message. Another British play that has been de facto banned is Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behzti, which features a rape and a murder in a Sikh gurdwara. Many people protested the play, and prominent community leaders accused Bhatti of being deliberately provocative. But as anyone who has seen the play can testify, the gurdwara setting is essential to the piece, because in a place of worship, the rapist can control the other characters. The shocking setting is therefore what makes the play work, and the equally disturbing themes are what makes it necessary. It is appalling that no theatre company has had the guts to re-stage Behzti, for fear of offending.

Just as the shocking setting is essential to Behzti, the offensive words are crucial to Black Watch. During the summer of 2006 I was lucky enough to work on the original NTS production as part of the video design team. In dozens of rehearsals, my ears were bombarded by the fruity language. Sat in the darkness of the Edinburgh Drill Hall, I had plenty of time to consider whether it was necessary.

By the opening night, I had reached my conclusion: the play would be rubbish without the bad language and sexist banter. Ironically, if the strong Fife vernacular of the characters were cleaned up, the message of the play would become incoherent.

There are several reasons for this. The first is a matter of authenticity. Gregory Burke’s play is based on interviews with former soldiers. It intends to be a story of war told from their point of view. For this story to be told properly, it is essential that their real voices are heard, because it is through their words that we get a genuine sense of what these men are like. The soldiers we send off to kill and die in the Middle East are not swashbuckling toffs speaking with received pronunciation. They are working class, inarticulate and insecure boys with no prospects other than the army. And when these men speak, they swear. It is integral to their vernacular. To sanitize their words would be to silence them.

The play even makes a specific promise to the soldiers not to do this. Black Watch has meta-scenes where a playwright interviews the soldiers. At one point they ask him about his intentions: “Are you gonna use us?” He promises to report truthfully what they say.

By the way, the person responsible for the most inauthentic part of Black Watch was… me.1 On of my tasks on the show was to choose a 20 second porn clip for the characters to watch during one of the scenes. I chose something laughably soft-core in the hope of not offending too many people, but I’m certain it is not the sort of thing that the soldiers would actually have watched.

There is no doubt that Black Watch is a shocking play. If it is performed right, the audience should be made to feel deeply uncomfortable with what they are witnessing. But this shock does not come from the language, but through the story: that of a group of men lured into the army, sent to fight a war under false pretences, and broken by the experience… all while the regiment itself is being gutted by suits in Whitehall. It is a Scottish story, the first and vindicating production of the National Theatre of Scotland, that has been applauded by audiences around the world. To hear that the school children of Angus, a Black Watch county, are to be denied the chance to engage with this story on the grounds of ‘good taste’ is, to my mind offensive. Scottish history is bloody and difficult and its people are raw and rude. Our children should be taught to celebrate that fact.

1. My colleagues have since pointed out that this is probably erroneous. It was I who prepared the 20 second clip for playout, but another of the team who picked out the lesbian porn sequence in question.

]]>http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/09/defending-black-watch/feed/0Building the Mythology of Jihadi Johnhttp://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/02/mythology-jihadi-john/
http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/02/mythology-jihadi-john/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 13:26:21 +0000http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=9494Ever since the ISIS murderer and propagandist ‘Jihadi John’ was revealed to be a British engineering graduate called Mohammed Emwazi, our news media has been saturated with reports about his school days, his personality, and the possible causes of his radicalisation: he ran into a goalpost as a kid; he went to school with Tulisa…

The coverage grates. Its full of cod-psychological comments from former pupils at his school, noting the fact that he was a ‘loner’. Reading these quotes, I’m reminded of one of the insights from Serial, the podcast phenomenon about the murder of a Baltimore schoolgirl Hae Min Lee in 1999. That series makes the point that people are susceptible to a confirmation bias in their memories. When told that someone is a murderer, people naturally recall those incidents where the person acted weird or like a ‘loner’. But alternatively, those who are convinced that the convicted person is innocent remember him as friendly and outgoing.

I think we lap up these reports about Mohammed Emwazi’s character because they reassure us that we could never be like him. In portraying him as an inately disturbed person, we avoid having to deal with the question of whether it is society, or culture, or religion that breeds these monsters. We avoid the awful possibiblity that we too could be brainwashed into unspeakable acts of violence.

Does this reporting help solve the problem of ISIS? I think not. Whether Emwazi was a sullen loner or a friendly extrovert, he is still out in Syria murdering charity workers with glee. All this sensationalism does is fuel his notoriety and raise his profile, which is precisely what he and his fundamentalist friends want.

It is worth linking once again to Charlie Brooker’s report on how best to reports acts of violence – without senstation, and focussing on the victims. Instead of the perpetrator.

The focus on Mohammed Emwazi takes the opposite approach, and may even prompt other troubled young men to choose the path of notoriety that ISIS offers.

A final thought: This coverage helps our own propaganda too. It builds up a new bogeyman, a personification of a complex threat in one brown face. Since Osama Bin Laden was killed in 2011 the media and our Governments have been in dire need of such a figure. Now they have one. Expect Mohammed Emwazi to be cited as a cautionary tale by every politician and commentator advocating an increase in defence spending and an expansion of the surveillance state.

]]>http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/03/02/mythology-jihadi-john/feed/1Pop Pairshttp://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/02/28/pop-pairs/
http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/02/28/pop-pairs/#commentsSat, 28 Feb 2015 20:03:57 +0000http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=9489I was listening Magic 105.4 earlier. They played Papa Don’t Preach by Madonna. The girl in the song pleads with her Dad to let her see someone he disapproves of.

Next in the playlist was Uptown Girl by Billy Joel. A young man laments that the woman he has fallen for is from a different social class.

It occurs to me that these two songs are Pop Pairs. They could be two views on the same relationship.

My sense is that you could probably make a Pop Pair out of any two songs where the singer declares their love for someone else. But the really great pop pairs will be two songs that present two sides of a less conventional relationship. For example,Young Girl by Gary Puckett, paired with Born Too Late by the Poni-Tails; or Money Money Money by ABBA, paired with Gold Digger by Kanye West.

]]>http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/02/28/pop-pairs/feed/0Gushing about PEN and free speech to Hack Freedomhttp://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/02/25/gushing-about-pen-and-free-speech-to-hack-freedom/
http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/02/25/gushing-about-pen-and-free-speech-to-hack-freedom/#commentsWed, 25 Feb 2015 18:45:40 +0000http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=9485A couple of weeks ago I gave an interview to journalism student Elizabeth Perlman about the work of English PEN and my approach to free speech. Elizabeth has uploaded an excerpt from the interview to the Hack Freedom website.

]]>http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/02/25/gushing-about-pen-and-free-speech-to-hack-freedom/feed/0How many coins do I need to get all the characters in Crossy Road?http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/02/25/how-many-coins-do-i-need-to-get-all-the-characters-in-crossy-road/
http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/2015/02/25/how-many-coins-do-i-need-to-get-all-the-characters-in-crossy-road/#commentsWed, 25 Feb 2015 11:57:04 +0000http://www.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=9458Continue reading How many coins do I need to get all the characters in Crossy Road?→]]>To be 95% certain of getting the last character you need from the Crossy Road vending machine, you’ll need 19,100 coins. (Jump to the full table.)

Let me explain.

Crossy Road is a game for iOS and Android. It’s been described as ‘endless frogger‘. You begin playing as a chicken, and you have to cross a road and other obstacles.

For extra fun, the game offers additional characters to replace the chicken. At the time of writing there are 72 characters: farm-yard animals, jungle frogs, ghosts, zombies, robots, aliens and fauna from the Australian outback. You can even play as humans in the form of the game’s three creators.

Eight of these characters are only unlockable by playing the game. The rest can either be purchased for 99 cents each, or else won for free via an 8-bit animated vending machine. As you play the game, you amass coins, and these can be spent in the virtual vending machine at 100 coins per spin. The reasons why the game is set up like this is set out in an interesting interview with the Matt Hall and Andy Sum, who made the game.

So, when I already have a large collection, how many coins do I need to be sure of getting a new character from the machine?

This is a mathematical problem. The chance of getting a new character on any given spin is simply the number of remaining characters, divided by the total number available. So, if you still need 16 animals, that is a 1 in 4 chance of success. But if you have all but 2 of the characters (my situation at the time of writing) then it’s a 1 in 32 chance of getting a new one when you spin the wheel.

Now a 1 in 32 chance to win might suggest that if only you made 32 spins of the wheel (which would cost 3,200 in-game coins) you would be certain of victory. But that is not how the laws of probability work. Each spin is an independent event. It’s possible that the vending machine may yield 32 robots in a row. So accruing 3,200 coins does not guarantee success, merely a better chance of it.

How many coins would we need to give ourselves, say, a 95% chance of a new toy?

We could draw up a complex probability tree, with all possible combinations of win-and-lose. This is time-consuming.

A simpler way to get at the answer is to consider the chances of abject failure. What if every spin of the wheel resulted in a duplicate prize? A 95% chance of success is the same as a 5% chance of failure. So if we work out how many failed pulls of the lever it takes before the probability drops below 5% or 0.05, we are also working out the number of spins it would take to be 95% confident that one of those spins would deliver a new toy.

If success on a single spin is a 2 in 64 chance, then failure is a 62 in 64 chance, or 0.96875 probability (quite high, but not certain). Failure on two consecutive spins is 0.96875 x 0.96875, or 0.968752 = 0.9384765625. Failure on 3 consecutive spins is 0.968753 or 0.909149169921875. Still a likely occurrence. We’ll need many more attempts before continued failure becomes unlikely.

How many spins (s) do we need to get the probability of constant failure all the way down to 0.05? The equation we need to solve looks like this:

The answer to this is 94.357640867. This means that if you do between 94 and 95 spins of the vending machine, there is a 95% probability that you will get at least one new toy.

Remember, this is for when you only need 2 more fluffy characters to complete the set. But it may be that you need more or less than that. In the future the developers, Hipster Whale, will probably add more characters. Finally, you may wish to do the calculation with a higher or lower probability than the 95% figure I chose. So all the numbers in the equation can be replaced with algebraic unknowns.

Where t is the total number of characters available; n is the number of characters you already have; p is the certainty that you would like to calculate (a number between 0 and 1); then s will be the number of spins required.

To make the answers meaningful, you have to round up whatever you calculate for s to a whole number, since you cannot have a fraction of a spin. And of course the number of coins you require is the number of spins, multiplied by 100.

I’ve used the equation above to determine the required number of coins to get a new character for a 50%, 95% and 99% probability. The results are tabulated below. I have omitted results when more than 30 characters are still required because at that point you will still be getting a new character at least every three or four spins.

I imagine that most people will consult this table when they are nearing a full complement of characters. Scroll down to the bottom to see the incredibly large number of coins required to give yourselves a sporting chance of actually getting those elusive final few cute pixellated characters.

Three schoolgirls from East London have left the UK to join ISIS, and everyone has an opinion. Some people say they are no better than Jihadi John, and that joining the fighters for Islamic state is tantamount to participating in the beheading of aid workers. they should be considered enemy combatants and we should not care one joy for their safety.

Other people say that these girls are victims: of brainwashing, of a culture that doesn’t value them, or of a society that offers the youth no aspirations. They’re essentially kidnap victims and we should mobilise to secure their safe return.

Here’s an idea: perhaps they’re both? Fully culpable genocide-enablers; and victims.
Too often in our political debate we treat blame as a zero-sum equation. When someone does something criminal, and we blame an addiction, his lack of opportunity, ‘society’ or whatever, that feels like we’re taking the blame away from the person who made the choice.

But that’s not how we should think about ‘blame’. Consider the wife who hires a hit man to bump off her husband. When they are both arrested for the murder, it’s not the case that the blame is shared and halved. The wife is 100% culpable and so is the hired gun. That’s because it’s a conspiracy and everyone involved is equally to blame.1

I think we should consider crimes and catastrophes that have a social dimension to be conspiracies too. The case of the three teenagers backpacking into Syria, it’s a conspiracy between the girls themselves, their social environment, and (it appears) some malign individuals who recruit and inspire this Jihadi-tourism.

If you consider most crimes to be conspiracies then the approach to stopping such acts must act on every element of that conspiracy. So of course it means punishing the person who committed the crime – sending them to prison, &cetera (I’m not sure what the law mandates for 15 year olds in the case at hand). But it also means making social interventions on the micro and macro level in order to neutralise the other ‘conspirators’ such as poverty, unemployment, the failure of politics and prejudices like sexism and racism.

This might seem obvious but it’s amazing how often our discussions on this subject devolve into a one-or-the-other approach.

Buttery

Speaking of the one-or-the other mentality, Howard Jacobson penned an important critique on this kind of debate last month. He attacked the ‘buttery’ of much discourse around fundamentalist violence.

Let me remind you how the Chomsky “but” operates. “The attack on the Twin Towers was an atrocity,” you concede, “‘but’…” And here you insert whichever qualifier takes your fancy.

Jacobson suggests using ‘and’ instead of ‘but’. For example: The three schoolgirls are endorsing ISIS murder and are the victims of brainwashing.

1. I first read this point about blame and a hit man about seven or eight years ago, in a blog post about where to assign the blame for terrorist activities – with the perpetrators or with Western foreign policy. I have always remembered the structure of the argument but have forgotten who wrote it! I’ve tried and failed to locate the post online… So this pseudo-acknowledgement will have to suffice.